Camden Fringe ends on 30 August. 125 shows still play in the closing week, at 25 venues. Booking adds £1.37, and door sales open 30 minutes before.
The Camden Fringe finishes on Sunday 30 August. Seven days are left, and they are busy ones.
125 shows have at least one performance between Monday 24 and Sunday 30 August, at 25 venues, and 252 performances in total.
Those figures come from counting the festival’s own listings on camdenfringe.com, pulled on 24 August. The festival runs from 3 to 30 August and its organisers say 450 or more shows are taking part across 39 venues. The published listings hold 459 shows and 1,145 performances, so the closing week is a little under a quarter of the whole festival.
How the last week falls
- Monday 24 August: 34 performances
- Tuesday 25 August: 39
- Wednesday 26 August: 36
- Thursday 27 August: 36
- Friday 28 August: 41, the busiest day of the week
- Saturday 29 August: 37
- Sunday 30 August: 29, the closing day and the quietest
Friday is the peak, and the closing Sunday is the thinnest. If you want the widest choice, go at the end of the week rather than on the very last day.
What is actually on
The 125 shows are not evenly spread across art forms. Counted by the genre each show is filed under in the festival listings:
| Genre | Shows in the final week |
|---|---|
| Theatre | 58 |
| Comedy | 32 |
| New Writing | 15 |
| Musical Comedy | 6 |
| Musical | 5 |
| Physical Theatre | 3 |
| Music | 2 |
| Play | 2 |
| Dance | 1 |
| Spoken Word | 1 |
Theatre and comedy account for 90 of the 125 shows. Dance, music and spoken word come to four between them, so if that is what you are after, book rather than turn up.
Where to go
Twenty-five venues have shows in the final week. These are the busiest, with the addresses the festival publishes:
| Venue | Address | Shows |
|---|---|---|
| Etcetera Theatre | 265 Camden High Street, NW1 7BU | 17 |
| The Courtyard Theatre | 40 Pitfield Street, N1 6EU | 13 |
| The Libra Theatre Cafe | 37 Chalk Farm Road, NW1 8AJ | 12 |
| Hen & Chickens Theatre | 109 St Paul’s Road, N1 2NA | 10 |
| Rosemary Branch Theatre | 2 Shepperton Road, N1 3DT | 10 |
| Aces and Eights | 156-158 Fortess Road, NW5 2HP | 9 |
| Barons Court Theatre | 28a Comeragh Road, W14 9HR | 9 |
| Camden Comedy Club | 100 Camden High Street, NW1 0LU | 7 |
| The Cockpit | Gateforth Street, NW8 8EH | 6 |
| Lion & Unicorn Theatre | 42-45 Gaisford Street, NW5 2ED | 5 |
| Old Red Lion Theatre (SHAKEFEST) | 418 St John Street, EC1V 4NJ | 5 |
| Camden People’s Theatre | 58-60 Hampstead Road, NW1 2PY | 4 |
| The Water Rats | 328 Gray’s Inn Road, WC1X 8BZ | 4 |
| Upstairs at the Gatehouse | 1 North Road, Highgate Village, N6 4BD | 4 |
The rest of the final week’s programme is at Museum of Comedy in Bloomsbury, Union Chapel’s Upper Hall, The London Art Bar on High Holborn, Canal Cafe Theatre, Bridewell Theatre, Phoenix Arts Club, the Castle Room at Castlehaven Community Hub in Camden Town, Circle and Star Theatre on Heath Street in Hampstead, Kunstraum Gallery, Young Actors Theatre Islington and Chisenhale Dance Space.
The Camden Fringe is only half in Camden
That venue list carries a fact worth stating plainly. Of the 125 shows in the closing week, 63 have a performance at an address in a Camden postcode district. The other 62 are listed entirely outside the borough.
The festival has never claimed otherwise. Its own description calls it a festival “which takes place in Camden during August” and asks audiences to support “North London’s best small theatres”. In practice the closing week reaches Shoreditch, Islington, Highgate Village and West London, using the festival’s own descriptions of those venues.
We counted a venue as inside the borough if its published postcode district is one of Camden’s. One venue on the list, Phoenix Arts Club at 1 Phoenix Street WC2H 8BU, sits on the Camden and Westminster boundary and is counted outside on that test.
Booking, prices and turning up on the door
The practical rules come from the festival’s own tickets page.
- Booking fee: £1.37 per ticket when you book through the festival site.
- No refunds. Bookings are “not refundable or transferable”.
- No physical tickets. You show a printed receipt or the confirmation on your phone at the venue.
- Door sales: if a show is not sold out you may be able to buy at the venue from 30 minutes before it starts. Some venues do not sell on the door or do not take cash, so booking ahead is safer.
- Box offices: many venues sell advance tickets themselves, and the festival lists their details on each venue page.
- Concessions: where a show offers them, they are available to under 16s, students, people receiving benefits, the unemployed, over 60s and disabled people.
Prices are set per show rather than by the festival. To take one example from the listings, Point of No Return at Upstairs at the Gatehouse on 25 and 26 August is advertised at £12 full price. The festival’s own line is that many shows cost less than a pint and only a few cost more than two.
What it means for you
- Most shows run about an hour. The festival says so itself, which is what makes two or three in an evening realistic.
- Book for the small stuff. Dance, music and spoken word have one or two shows each in the final week. Those sell out first and are hardest to catch on the door.
- Check the venue postcode before you set off. A Camden Fringe ticket is not a guarantee of a Camden address, and several of the busiest venues this week are in N1.
- Friday 28 August has the most on, with 41 performances. Sunday 30 August has 29, and it is the last day.
- Getting there: most of the borough venues sit on the Northern line between Euston and Kentish Town. Our Camden tube times and fares page has the zone and fare detail, Camden roadworks and travel covers current closures, and things to do in Camden has the rest of what is on.
Sources
- Camden Fringe, festival dates, scale and description
- Camden Fringe tickets page, booking fee, door sales and concessions
- Camden Fringe venues, venue addresses
- Camden Fringe published listings, counted on 24 August 2026 for performances per day, shows per venue and shows per genre. Counts are taken from the show records themselves, not the site’s date tags, which also cover a second listing type
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